The Merchant of the Two Worlds

Every trade has a price. His was the future.
Adrian Vale is twenty-four, broke, and newly fired for being too slow. On the walk home he finds a green door in an alley where there has only ever been a wall.
Behind it is a shop that trades between two worlds. On one side, his own city: loud, wasteful and full of things. On the other, a dying land of ash where three cans of peaches are worth a fortune in gold, and a torch can buy a soldier's loyalty.
Every Keeper before him ended the same way. And the figure at the bottom of his page is climbing faster than any of theirs.
The Merchant of the Two Worlds is a portal fantasy with a countdown at its center: a story about what things are really worth, what power costs, and a quiet archivist who reads the one record nobody else bothered to finish.